Panetta assures Afghans of full inquiry of video

This story was compiled from reports by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

KABUL, Afghanistan

A video showing four U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of three dead Taliban fighters provoked anger and condemnation Thursday in Afghanistan and around the world. U.S. officials said they feared the images could incite anti-U.S. sentiment at a particularly delicate moment in the war effort.

The Obama administration is struggling to keep President Hamid Karzai on its side as it carefully tries to open talks with the Taliban. Yet the video showing such a desecration - a possible war crime - is likely to weaken the U.S. position with both. The Taliban and Karzai were each quick to hold up the images as evidence of U.S. brutality, a message with broad appeal in Afghanistan, where word of the video was slowly spreading Thursday.

Senior military officials in Kabul and at the Pentagon who were scrutinizing the video confirmed it was authentic and that they had identified the Marines as members of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, all of whom had completed a tour of Afghanistan this fall before returning to base at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The officials did not immediately release their names.

A Marine official told The Washington Post that investigators were questioning two individuals whom they had preliminarily identified as being in the video.

Pentagon officials said the video had been made sometime between March and September 2011, when the Marine battalion was deployed to Helmand province, a strategic Taliban heartland and a center of the opium poppy trade. The officials said they did not know the precise location depicted in the video but they said it had likely been made in the northern part of the province, where the battalion had operated. Seven out of about 1,000 Marines in the battalion were killed during the seven-month deployment.

Pentagon officials said that as far as they knew all four Marines were still on active duty. They said they could identify one of them as a corporal based on his uniform.

The video, posted on public video sharing websites including LiveLeak and YouTube, began ricocheting around international news websites on Wednesday.

Even before the authenticity of the video had been confirmed, expressions of outrage and contrition by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top officials left no doubt they regarded it as real.

Aware of the video's potential to damage the United States' already shaky image in Afghanistan, Panetta denounced the video as "utterly deplorable" and called Karzai to assure him a full investigation was under way and those responsible would be punished.

"I wanted him to know how grieved we were at what happened here," Panetta said in an interview while traveling to Fort Bliss, Texas. "What I want is an investigation into what happened here, what laws were violated by what took place, who these individuals were."

The video showed four men in the Marines' distinctive sand-colored camouflage uniforms urinating over the three corpses - one covered in blood - splayed on the ground before them. The men joke and jaw with one another, a lewd reference is made, and one is heard to say, "have a great day, buddy."

The Taliban initially indicated the images would not undermine the push toward talks, regarding the video as just more evidence of what they view as U.S. brutality and disrespect for Afghans.

"This is not the first time we see such brutality," a Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told Reuters.

But later Thursday, in an official statement issued to news outlets, the Taliban dropped its references to the talks and stressed the brutality message.

"We strongly condemn the inhuman act of wild American soldiers, as ever, and consider this act in contradiction with all human and ethical norms," the statement said.

Karzai struck a similar tone - he, too, described the video as "inhuman" - saying in a statement that he was deeply disturbed by the images. He asked the Americans to severely punish anyone found guilty of a crime.

"This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms," he said.

The actions of the Marines in the video could amount to a violation of the Geneva Convention, which requires that the bodies of those killed in war be treated honorably.